Profiting from Violence: Emergency Medicine, Electoral Politics, and Global Economic Restructuring in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s

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“Profiting from Violence” traces the transformation of Emergency Medicine from its association with sub-standard emergency room care and medical backwater before the 1960s to its new association with modern labor- and capital- intensive technology and medical care by the 1980s. The chapter situates this transformation within broader shifts in U.S. politics by connecting the violence of global economic restructuring associated with Cold War military intervention abroad to the local violence found in Los Angeles’s poor Black and Brown neighborhoods. Rather than attribute higher rates of street crime, violence, and “social disorder” to these global economic shifts, the chapter argues that Los Angeles’s mostly white electorate shifted away from supporting public health and welfare services to fight poverty and violence towards enlarging emergency medicine, policing, and prisons by the 1980s to manage poverty and violence as everyday expected features of modern life.
 

Dr. Ramos is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies and holds an affiliate appointment with the Center for Science, Technology, and Society. He has previously served as a Ford Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program in Race, Science, and Society (PRSS) at the University of Pennsylvania and as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow of Race in Science in Medicine at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ), the Department of Africana Studies, and the Cogut Institute. He is the recipient of the Committee of LGBT Historian’s Audre Lorde Prize, the Western History Association’s Ray Allen Billington Prize, and the Journal of History of Medicine and Allied Science’s Stanley Jackson Prize.